Six young math whizzes from the U.S. win an international competition in record style

If the United States sends six kids to the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong, where a perfect individual score is 42, and together they score 252, does the country have reason to cheer?

If you can't answer that one, then you desperately need a remedial course in arithmetic (or perhaps just new batteries in your calculator). The U.S. team members, all public high-school students, started out by competing against 350,000 of their peers on the American High School Mathematics Examination, aced two tougher exams, and prepped for a month at the U.S. Naval Academy. Only then did they board a...